


Actually, There's Way More than Fifty of Them

by Silex



Category: Fifty Shades of Grey - All Media Types
Genre: Brave New Bork Exchange, Crack, Gen, Humor, if you hadn't already guessed that, making shit up, nothing to do with the series]
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 20:07:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14433123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Total nonsense written for the Brave New Bork Exchange, a gift exchange all about misunderstanding titles and interpretation them in the most literal way possible. So if you're for BDS&M type stuff I'm so sorry. On the other hand if you actually want to read about a bunch of different grey and greyish colors than boy do I have the fic for you.





	Actually, There's Way More than Fifty of Them

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



> Saw the name of this exchange, looked at it to see what it was and then saw this particular request. The story wrote itself, especially because Bork. I don't know what Bork is supposed to mean in this context, but what it meant to me was that this fic had to be written.

It was a slow day in the paint department, probably because of the weather and for once they were overstaffed. She’d opened with Sally, the new hire, and Doc had come in a few hours later. He’d greeted the two of them, gone off to see what there was to do, leaving Beatrice to continue teaching Sally the basics of the department.

The three of them had run out of things to do about an hour ago and ended up just kind of hanging out and talking in between helping what few customers there were. Thanks to Doc being a Renaissance man through and through, she and Sally had learned about the chemical properties of everything in the department and the basics of ballroom dancing as well.

One of the managers had come by to see what was going on when Doc had moved on to demonstrating the foxtrot while simultaneously telling them about titanium dioxide and why it made a difference in the different brands of paint they sold. Apparently one of the companies actually had a lighter shade of white than the others, which was matching white, off-white, and grey paints was such a hassle unless the customer actually knew what they wanted.

The manager listened in, and since learning more about the products they sold wasn’t something they could be reprimanded over, even if the lesson was taking place while dancing, the conversation was allowed to continue. Though the manager had demanded a clarification – he’d thought that Doc played guitar in a band, not taught dance.

It turned out that Doc wasn’t the one who played guitar, that was Sven, another employee in the department, Doc played the trombone.

That was Doc though, he did everything and had stories about it.

Sally had listened with rapt attention, amazed that someone working part time in a hardware store knew so much about so much. Of course Sally was still in college and going to trade school at nights to pick up more. Sally was well on her way to being a jack of all trades, so of course she’d decided to ask Beatrice what she knew other than mixing paint.

“Making stuff mostly, give me something to go off of and I can run with it,” she laughed. There were other things she knew, marine biology and a bit of oceanography that she’d learned through osmosis thanks to her childhood, way too much about dogs, and a lot of really, really strange animal facts because she was interested in weird stuff. She doubted that Sally wanted to know how to strip a terrier or find out about the strangest anatomical quirks in the animal kingdom though. Sally wasn’t that kind of girl.

Doc shook his head, “Don’t get her started.”

He’d been on the receiving end of one of her bullshit sessions once had she’d actually had him convinced that she thought the moon landing was a hoax, and that the Freemasons controlled the internet.

“What do you mean?” Sally looked back and forth between the two of them.

Well, if she wanted an example…

“Okay, let’s see, how about I give you a lesson on…” Beatrice looked around for inspiration and her eyes settled on one of the new brochures that a vendor had brought in. Martha Stewart’s color collection may have been retired, but her legacy lived on in the trend of combining drab with bright. Perfect, “Some of the more popular colors. People are going to ask you about them so you might as well know their history.”

“Their history? Like the companies that made them?”

Sally sounded confused, which was good.

“Nah,” she dismissed the idea with a shrug, “The colors themselves. All of their names have meaning and knowing that helps a lot given how similar some of the colors are. I mean you’d think all greys are the same, right?”

Doc rolled his eyes and started heading back to the aisles to see if there was anything to do. Sally on the other hand seemed intrigued, “Well, grey is grey, right?”

“At first it might seem that way, but take Planetary Silver for example. Kind of a weird name, right? I mean you don’t think of silver when you think of planets, right? But it’s named that because it’s the exact color of Deimos, which is one of Mars’ moons. Don’t get it confused with Lunar surface though, that color came first. They couldn’t have two colors with the same name and Deimos Silver would be too confusing for people, so they went with Planetary instead,” she paused for a moment to gauge if she should continue along that track or change directions. Cosmology seemed to be going over Sally’s head. Maybe a bit of a history lesson then, “Planetary Silver looks kind of similar to Revere Pewter, but just remember that Paul Revere was a silversmith, which is why it’s got that name.”

“But why not call it Revere Silver then?” Sally wondered.

“Too many silvers, I mean you’ve got Silver Charm, Silver Swordplay, Silver Sands, Silver Hill, Silver Bullet, Sonic Silver, Millennium Silver, Silver Mine and on and on. Besides, Pewter sounds classier and sometimes you want a classy looking color. The name’s what matters when you get a color, you’re getting a feeling and a story as well as a color that way.”

Sally mulled that over for a minute before responding, “But if you’re getting a feeling and a story why violent names like Swordplay and Bullet?”

The perfect setup for another popular color, “That’s nothing. You want to know about Repose Grey? Think peaceful repose, because it’s the specific dull, cool color of a traditional funeral shroud. When I think of it I think of a ghost wearing a sheet to remember what the color looks like – very important when you’re helping someone coordinate a room.”

“That’s horrible!” Sally’s eyes were wide.

“Okay, no more morbid stuff then,” she didn’t want to frighten their newest hire off so she changed directions, “We’ve got Silver Tabby, which is darker than you’d expect. Just remember that tabby cats have darker stripes and think of those stripes. Timberwolf is more brown than you’d expect for a grey, but remember wolves aren’t really grey. On the other hand Wolf Gray is much darker and almost kind of blueish. My way of remembering that is that it’s blue looking because there’s a type of fish called a seawolf and when you think of fish you think of the ocean, which is blue.”

Okay, she was going to give herself points for being able to bring in a mention of fish without making it any more of a stretch than she already had. It also let her move on to a whole new set of colors, “But don’t, please, don’t get it confused with Dolphin Fin which is kind of greenish and I know you’re going to say that dolphins aren’t greenish, but that’s because you’re thinking of bottlenose dolphins. It’s more the dolphin fish, Mahi-Mahi. They’re very greenish when you first pull them out of the water, though they go grey pretty quick after that. On the other hand Silver Marlin is a much lighter, much purer grey, which is kind of confusing because of countershading. Just remember, it’s the color of the fish’s sides, not their back.”

A customer arrived at the desk, interrupting her little lecture.

“Hi, I was wondering about these two colors,” they held up a pair of swatches and unless she was mistaken the colors in question were Cathedral Gray and Graceful Gray, “Which one is more brown? Because I don’t want a color that’s too blue on my walls.

Sally swallowed nervously and took a step back, clearly daunted by helping choose between the two shades after all she’d just been told.

Beatrice stepped forward, “Just give me a sec to put them into the computer and see what goes into them.”

A few keystrokes later she’d pulled up the exact ratios of pigments that went into each and had printouts to explain to the customer.

Sally had by this point fled to the aisles to see if Doc needed help.

It would be interesting to see if Doc told her that she was being trolled or if he’d let it keep going.

Sally had asked what she was good at after all, and Beatrice had been honest. It wasn’t her fault if Sally had forgotten she’d asked for a demonstration of how good she was at making stuff up.


End file.
